"Woodstock Gamelan" photo by Anna Rubin

Lydia Ayers is a Hong Kong-based composer who plays flutes from a variety of cultural traditions. She has worked with extended vocal and woodwind techniques, including quarter tones, multiphonics and other unusual flute timbres. She is creating native American, Australian, Chinese and Indonesian computer music designs. She has extensively researched and composed with microtonal tuning systems, especially unlimited just intonation. She also uses a 75-tone Indian/Partch scale on the “Woodstock Gamelan,” a tubular percussion instrument built to her specifications by Woodstock Percussion. She has modeled the Woodstock Gamelan and other gamelan instruments using Csound, and authored Cooking with Csound: Woodwind and Brass Recipes, a CD-ROM package which gives synthesis designs for wind instruments. She has played gamelan at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University. Her Virtual Gamelan CD has been released on Albany Records. She chaired the 1996 International Computer Music Conference in Hong Kong. She has given workshops in microtonal music and microtonal research has taken her to Indonesia, Spain and Tunisia, and she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Electronic Music in New York in 1990. Her pieces have been performed by the City Chamber Orchestra in Hong Kong and the Da Capo Chamber Players in New York; at International Computer Music Conferences in Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore, Miami and New Orleans; at the Musicarama Festival in Hong Kong; at the Asian Composer's League World New Music Festival in Thailand; at the Atelier de Recherche Experimentale at IRCAM in Paris, France; by members of the New Music Consort in New York, NY; by Isabelle Ganz at the Ijsbreker in Amsterdam, in Israel and throughout North America; at Composers' Forum concerts in New York, NY; at the Microtonal Music Festival in New York, NY; at SEAMUS; at SCI conferences; at the Fourth Annual Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival; at the NOW Music Festival in Columbus, Ohio; at the International Double Reed Society Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada; at American Women Composers marathons in Boston; by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and in Sweden, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Alaska, California, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Alabama and Texas.